AToWC stipulates that, when using weapon maintenance rules, an appropriate maintenance kit is either practically or literally required to maintain any weapon. However, there only seems to be maintenance kits for energy, ballistic, and gauss weapons. This kind of leaves gyrojets, melee weapons, bows, and thrown weapons out in the cold. Am I missing something, and if not, what have been your go-to compromises?
I dunno how others would rule it, but a Gyrojet would be a slightly more expensive Ballistic weapons kit. (much like they were in real life).
For more exotic weapons, a certain amount of GM discretion needs to be used. A thrown weapon, for example, is by definition disposable, at most you'll have a vise or locking pliers and a whet-stone or something similar. Knife maintenance kits would be rather a fractional cost item unless the blades are made of something exotic, or they're vibroblades, in which case your electronics maintenance kit is your friend.
thing is, no RPG system in existence can cover EVERY eventuality a player can come up with, there's simply not enough room in any book that might actually be affordable to cover every eventuality even inside the game-system.
hell, just to maintain the rifles, pistols and shotguns I presently own, my "cleaning kit" is made up of SEVERAL commecial kits, plus individual items purchased separately, and costs slightly less than the array of automotive tools I've accumulated from life, family members, and the odd garage sale. (When I moved into my current house, I had two big totes of the stuff for the cars, and a couple big plastic totes full of gun cleaning and low-end maintenance...and My collection's not that comprehensive-I still run into things I don't own and do need, and I've been at this with the gunssince the late teens and am just shy of fifty now...)
Because RPG developers CAN NOT cover EVERY aspect, there are workarounds for Game-masters and players. I've got a character in a D&D game who's something called an "Artificer" and my GM has been making me 'work up' the character's methods and procedures, because even with all the printed materials in general, there are things I do with this character that fall outside in the gaps of what is published. (Katyana is currently working on refining potassium nitrate. He made me-the-player dig up obsolete reference books for basic organic chemistry, then work up how she's doing it, all so that I can have her 'Wand of Blasting!!!" function without being a true magical item.)
If you're the GM, engage your players in describing WHAT they think the kit should contain, and how much it should cost will kind of...work itself out?
If you're the player, a little book-work in the real world to find appropriate items and devices, you present your idea to your GM, with your reasoning, and most of the time, they'll tweak a little bit on it and let it roll if the book doesn't have a nice catalogue entry for it.
